It is mentioned that Dr. Sahin's greatest bottleneck in his work has been the ability to handle molecules in such a way that does not produce false positives or negatives.
He has used AFM machines to measure intermolecular forces but could not be sure whether what he was measuring came from a single molecule or a group of molecules.
He felt that the "ability to handle these individual molecules was limited by [his] surface chemistry.
Dr. Sahin now believes that the answer may lie with Nanogea's approach to molecular detection.

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"Dr. Sahin is correct in his assessment that our approach increases precision and virtually eliminates the chance of false positives.

As director of the nanomechanical sensing lab at Harvard's Rowland Institute [1], Dr. Ozgur Sahin is one of a new generation of innovators using Scanning Probe Microscopes (SPMs) and developing techniques to learn more about the nanoscale properties of materials [2].
Dr. Sahin's research covers topics ranging from polymer composite systems to cell and molecular biology.
This diverse sample set provides a rich test bed for him to study harmonic signals that result when a probe taps on a surface during TappingMode SPM.
These harmonics contain valuable information about the elastic modulus, adhesion, and other phenomena that occur when a tip interacts with a sample.

With traditional SPM cantilevers, harmonic signals are severely attenuated by the transfer function of the cantilever.
While working with novel cantilever designs to amplify a single harmonic at Stanford University, Sahin realized that the torsional motion of the cantilever typically has much higher bandwidth than its flexural motion, and that many harmonics could be observed simultaneously by moving the tip laterally to an off-axis position on the cantilever.

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Veeco has collaborated with Sahin to produce cantilever probes that take advantage of this phenomenon and allow the collection of data from over 15 different harmonics simultaneously.

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About Ozgur SahinDr. Ozgur Sahin received his B.S. from Bilkent University, Turkey, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Stanford University, CA. In 2004, Sahin won the grand prize at the Collegiate Inventors Competition, organized by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Inventors Hall of Fame, for his invention of a new kind of atomic force microscope capable of measuring tip-sample interaction forces.Sahin subsequently became a Rowland Junior Fellow at the Rowland Institute at Harvard in 2005, where he is currently directing the nanomechanical sensing lab, fully funded by the Rowland Institute[1].

"The greatest bottleneck in my work is the ability to handle molecules in such a way that does not produce false positives or negatives," says Ozgur Sahin, a junior fellow at Harvard's Rowland Institute.Sahin uses an AFM to measure intermolecular forces and provides that data to other scientists.
"We can't be sure whether what we're measuring comes from a single molecule or a group of molecules," he says.

Sahin came across a technology he believes has potential to help researchers work with greater precision, improving the accuracy of nanoscale measurements.
The material is a nanoparticle coating called NanoCone that is made by Westlake Village, Calif.-based Nanogea, Inc.
NanoCone is used to coat AFM probes and the substrates on which samples are placed with cone-shaped nanoparticles that lift and separate individual molecules so they can more easily and accurately be measured.
Sahin discovered Nanogea research papers describing their technology while he was searching the Web for new technologies that might improve the accuracy and efficiency of his AFM.

Biological molecules have a recognition capability, Sahin says, adding, "They know to which molecules they want to bind, but our ability to handle these individual molecules is limited by our surface chemistry.

It is mentioned that Dr. Sahin's greatest bottleneck in his work has been the ability to handle molecules in such a way that does not produce false positives or negatives.
He has used AFM machines to measure intermolecular forces but could not be sure whether what he was measuring came from a single molecule or a group of molecules.
He felt that the "ability to handle these individual molecules was limited by [his] surface chemistry.
Dr. Sahin now believes that the answer may lie with Nanogea's approach to molecular detection.

...

"Dr. Sahin is correct in his assessment that our approach increases precision and virtually eliminates the chance of false positives.